This application relates to linear beamforming for wireless devices in cellular networks.
Theoretical studies on the wireless broadcast channel have shown that significant throughput gains are possible when multiple antenna elements are installed at the transmitter and advanced spatial signal processing is employed to serve multiple co-channel terminals as opposed to the conventional time- and frequency-division multiple access. In particular, for an isolated network with M transmit antennas, n homogeneous users equipped with N receive antennas and block Rayleigh fading, the capacity of the multi-antenna Gaussian broadcast channel scales as M log2 log2(nN) for increasingly large n, achieving both a multiplexing gain (M) and a multiuser diversity gain log2 log2(nN).
A known capacity achieving strategy for the multi-antenna Gaussian broadcast channel involves a highly complex non-linear interference pre-cancellation technique, known as dirty paper coding (DPC), which is usually infeasible in practice. Several suboptimal strategies have been investigated to overcome this limitation. Among them, linear transmit beamforming has attracted great interests since it can achieve a large fraction of the capacity at much lower cost and implementation complexity. In linear beamforming, each data stream is modulated by a spatial signature vector before transmission through multiple antennas. Careful selection of the signature vectors can mitigate (or even eliminate) mutual interference among different streams. Surprisingly, random unitary beamforming is sufficient to achieve the same sum-rate scaling growth M log2 log2(nN) of DPC for increasingly large number of users. However, when the number of users is smaller, random beamforming may perform poorly and more effective beamforming strategies have been proposed to achieve improved performance. They include for example linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) and zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming. Other works, instead, make use of the uplink-downlink duality and design the transmit linear filters so as to minimize the total transmit power under given constraints on the users' rates. Others have designed transmit linear filters in order to maximize the sum-rate.
Many existing works have addressed the beamforming design problem by assuming that each base station communicates with its respective terminals independently: in such framework, inter-cell interference is simply regarded as additional background noise and the design of the beamforming vectors is performed on a per-cell basis only. However, future wireless cellular networks will be interference-limited; hence, significant performance gains are possible if inter-cell interference is mitigated via coordinated processing across multiple cells. Ideally, if both data and channel state information of all users could be shared in real-time, all base stations could act as a unique large array with distributed antenna elements and could employ joint beamforming, scheduling and data encoding to simultaneously serve multiple co-channel users. In practice, a much lower level of coordination appears to be feasible depending on the bandwidth of the backbone network connecting the base stations. For example, it may be reasonable to assume that each user is served by only one base station: in this case, the set of downlink beam-vectors can be optimized based on the inter-cell channel qualities. Also, complexity of the network infrastructure and synchronization requirements may limit the number of coordinating base stations: in this case, coordination can be performed on a per-cluster basis.